Locker and Opener: Cat and mouse with a twist

Manchi and Barunflower's Locker and Opener is a cat and mouse story where both the protagonist and the antagonist can tend to switch roles when the odds are in their favor creating a powerful twist and turn story. Locker and Opener finished its first story arc, so I would like to explain my first impressions of this unique story.

Doblin Kim, The Opener is a detective that works for the Korean police who can usually get anyone to talk, however it seems he has met his match when a device that only he can see has been attached to a child witness will not come off. This seemingly strange device is created only by Hamju Gong, The Locker. Hamju is a mercenary assassin who will do anything for money, including destroying people's lives by making sure nobody remembers them. Both are intelligent characters who tend to get into the other person's life via obsession with their jobs.

Doblin and Hamju have one special ability with their own rules and are mostly similar other than the functions of the power. Doblin can ask a question and a person's mind will open spitting out the information for everyone to hear. This ability doesn't just work on people's secrets, this also works for opening simple mechanisms: closed doors, connected bones, and anything else that can be conjoined will open by inserting a device and saying "Open." Doblin can use this power three times per day. Then, he must wait until midnight to insert three more devices the next day. Hamju has the opposite effect. If a heart or secrets can be unlocked, she can make sure it becomes locked to everyone. That includes the person's item she locked. To use Hamju's power, she has to touch the object she wants to lock, then she needs to provide an amount of time to the lock. What makes her dangerous is the fact that she can choose to unlock for an infinite amount of time which makes her ability stronger than a man who can only open objects. This device is unopenable by Doblin making her almost undefeated as one-touch, and you could lose everything. She can only insert three locks per day and must wait until midnight to insert three more locks

In Loss of Reality, the first arc of the series, Doblin starts as the cat by outright searching for answers as fast as he can and searches for the Locker to defeat her and bring her to justice. He has to keep his ability under wraps or he might get sent to jail for unlawfully getting people to speak, so he must search for her secretly. He approaches her hotel during the blackout she created. However, trying to hide inside her suite as a bystander, Dobin jumps right into her room and attempts to fight her knowing that she had run out of lock uses that day, and uses his final lock of the day to find her name. Hamju spits out her name immediately after the device is inserted and the two begin to fight each other. Both waiting out the last minute on the clock for their ability to come back. Hamju locks Doblin's right arm at the stroke of midnight making sure he can't use it while chasing her down, then knocks him into a window using a dining chair. While holding for dear life and struggling due to the rain forecast, Hamju uses this to her advantage and places a lock on Detective Doblin ensuring he will never remember the woman with the power to lock people.

Doblin wakes up in a hospital unable to use his right arm. Anytime he hears Hamju, a pink-haired woman, or Locker, he will hear silence or see scribbles where descriptions are located. He has essentially been removed from finding anything about the woman that destroyed his life, or so it seems. Hamju was unable to add a timeframe of infinite to his lock and the lock defaulted to unlock in twelve hours, meaning that Doblin will be able to go back to searching for her in twelve hours, he just doesn't notice it yet. Hamju must use this time to go back and make sure that he will never attack her again, so she wears another disguise and takes him to an alley to finish the job. Hiring goons to capture him until midnight when her ability comes back. Doblin listens to her, but when Hamju tries to give a fake description of the Locker to Doblin who can't hear any true description, he becomes paranoid enough to ask the "bystander" to say "I'm the Locker." This should sound like silence to him, and once he hears it he should be able to leave as if nothing happened. However, he recorded the voice frequency to know that she said "I'm the locker" He now knows that the girl in front of him is the Locker, and this is a trap, and Hamju just enjoys the Sadism of being able to say who she is to the man that is trying to find her. He uses this to his advantage and attempts to use a lock to find where he would be ambushed. Her goons come to her rescue and make his first open useless.

The climax of this arc happens on top of a city crane. After being tied up, Doblin is interrogated by Hamju, she asks why he's only using his power to be a detective when he could make more money becoming a criminal like her. Doblin's response is "Cash and checks can be tracked, plus CCTV's are everywhere,...But I know of other things that can be opened very easily. For example, a Highwayman's hitch. Something that can't be force open and only tightens if you try to." Doblin has explained that even if I use my power I can still be caught. He then explains to her that he doesn't need his ability to untie himself on the crane. Doblin uses another Open learning everything about her ability that had been previously explained to the audience. Hamju then tries to lock Doblin's neck for him to struggle to open anything for twelve hours. Doblin inserted an open device into himself to always remember the name Hamju Gong, The Locker. As Hamju attempts to throw him off the crane, Doblin realizes that he can use his ability on things other than memories and installs one last open device; One that Hamju has no clue what he opened.

He then asks her about locking the child's memory. Her response is, "I'm just bad luck. Like a car accident, people just so happen to bump into me!" These words anger Doblin as he tries to drop her off the crane by threatening to drop her if she doesn't lock away her power. Hamju gouges Doblin's arm with her nails and attempts to escape to another part of the crane, but her sense of balance gets disrupted with Doblin's final device that opened one of the bones that form the brain's cranium. The Temporal Bone, a bone that protects the inner ear and the vestibular system (a system that helps with balance and coordination.) As she plummets down, she stops mid-air due to a harness she was wearing. Angered at losing to Doblin but still considering him a valuable person, Hamju screams, "I've made up my mind! I'm going to lock you and your family away from your own mind! I'll turn you into a blank slate and keep you for myself! I'll give you a completely new life so that you won't waste your talent." I believe this threat will stay for the entirety of the series and will be the drive Doblin needs to defeat her before she defeats him. Doblin explains that he destroyed someone's life with his ability in the past, and tells her that killing her will be redemption for opening someone's heart by removing the Carabiner holding her harness, but only to find out there was another harness on the other end of the crane.

After both characters introduced each other, they both created scenarios where they both have to walk into the heart of the enemy to fight. This series has introduced the concept of both characters being a cat and a mouse. At any time, the roles can switch due to the outcome of each character's abilities. I can't wait to learn more about these two and see what creative events and outcomes Manchi and Barunflower have for this series.